wordoftheday: read from official RSS feed (Merriam-Webster now returns 403)

[gderoo]

Problem

The Word Of The Day app always renders "Something went wrong getting today's word!".

The cause is not a stale CSS selector. https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/calendar now returns HTTP 403 to server-side requests, so the app never reaches its parsing step:

[word_of_the_day.star] Starting
[word_of_the_day.star] Cache miss
[word_of_the_day.star] Got code '403' from page response

The response is a Cloudflare bot challenge (cf-mitigated: challenge, body titled "Just a moment..."), returned regardless of User-Agent or request headers. I tested no-UA, a Go-http-client UA, a Chrome UA and a full browser header set — all 403, on both /word-of-the-day/calendar and /word-of-the-day.

Fix

Merriam-Webster's official WOTD RSS feed, https://www.merriam-webster.com/wotd/feed/rss2, is not subject to that rule:

Path	Status	Cloudflare
/word-of-the-day/calendar	403	cf-mitigated: challenge
/wotd/feed/rss2	200	no mitigation

Same edge, same client, same second — the challenge is scoped to the HTML paths, so the feed is reachable server-side. It also exposes a <merriam:shortdef> element carrying a short definition, which suits the 64x32 display and matches what the calendar scrape was after.

Changes

• html.star → xpath.star; calendar URL → feed URL
• Word from item[1]/title, definition from item[1]/merriam:shortdef. Items are newest-first, so the first is today's word — deliberately not date-matched, since the feed publishes at 01:00 ET and a device in a timezone ahead of that would find no entry for its "today"
• Guard the body for <rss before parsing. xpath.loads raises on non-XML, so an unexpected HTML response would crash the app rather than render the error state — which matters here, since the failure being fixed is Cloudflare serving HTML
• Empty-check now also catches None, which query() returns for a missing node

No new services or API keys. Render layout, colors, fonts, cache key, TTL and cached payload shape are unchanged, and error states are still never cached.

Testing

Verified with pixlet v0.34.0.

• pixlet render — renders today's word correctly
• pixlet lint — clean
• pixlet check apps/wordoftheday/ — ✔️
• pixlet format — no changes

Failure paths, each confirmed to render the error state without crashing:

Case	Result
Non-200 (403)	error state
200 but not XML	caught by the <rss guard
Valid RSS, no merriam:shortdef	error state
Valid RSS, no <title>	error state

The last two were tested against crafted RSS fixtures served locally rather than a live feed. A two-item fixture also confirmed the app selects item 1 and ignores item 2, so the newest-first selection is doing what it claims rather than coincidentally matching today's word. The cache-hit path was verified to read back the written payload.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

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[gderoo]

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[gderoo]

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